Thread by @asymmetricinfo

So normally I tweetstorm my columns as soon as they run. But this week, a minor but debilitating health crisis intervened, and I was delayed. So: yesterday's tweetstorm, today! washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-a…

A couple of notes on my tweetstorms: during my paywall tweetstorm, a number of people asked why they should subscribe when I gave them the content for free. Answer: I am too wily for you, friend. Tweetstorm contains only *ancillary* material that did not make the column.

I use them to clarify misunderstandings, answer q's that came up in comments, and place material that I couldn't fit for space.

This one won't even contain all the ancillaries, because some went into a follow-up column that will run sometime this afternoon.

That said, onward!

First Q: Why are you maligning the caring medical staff of Alder Hey, who were just doing what they thought was best for the child?

Answer: I am not maligning them. It is not "maligning me" to say that I cannot cure cancer.

I don't think doctors are any better qualified than parents to answer the metaphysical question "when should life end?" Thy're trained in medicine, not metaphysics. Also, people who are trained in metaphysics can't seem to provide definitive answers to those questions either. :)

More on this in today's column, so I'll leave it there.

Next question: How dare you say liberalism "breaks open the family and assigns its functions to the state?"

This question came in two flavors: from people on the left who were confused about what I meant by "liberal individualism", and believed that I meant "left-wing politics". And from libertarians who understood what I meant, but confused libertarianism with liberalism.

This is gonna be a long one, so bear with me.

So for starters, libertarianism certainly is a purist strain of liberalism. As a libertarian, I obviously think this is the correct strain. However, it is not the only possible way for liberalism to go.

So let's start with a basic definition of liberalism as "A political philosophy dedicated to maximizing individual liberty".

What threats are there to individual liberty? The state, obviously. Violence, obviously. But also, in a traditional society, the family.

It is somewhat hard for someone from the west to comprehend how *totalizing* the family is in other places.

They choose your spouse because it actually matters a great deal to them who you marry, and not just because they want you to be happy. Family obligations are binding in a way that we just don't experience.

The dominance of first-cousin marriages in many places seems weird to us (and is bad for reinforcing nasty recessive genes), but it's rational if what you're trying to do is conserve family capital and minimize the extent of your additional obligations to outsiders.

Your family controls who you marry, where you live, what occupations you can have--"adulthood", as an American experiences it, where you get total power over all the facets of your life, just isn't a thing in many places.

(Obviously, we make choices to be close to parents, sacrifice for spouses, etc. But they are *choices*. In many societies, they're not. You can't live in that culture and choose anything over your family without *grave* repercussions.)

When the family is the dominant unit of economic, social, and political life, all sorts of rules that seem to us simply backward and oppressive make sense. Arranged marriages. Primogeniture. Wifely identity disappearing into that of the husband. A lot of sexual purity rules. Etc.

These things take away the liberty of the individual to maximize the welfare of the family. We can argue about whether this is good or bad (most people in the west would say 'good', most people in traditional societies would differ). But we should agree that it is what happens.

The primary, obvious thing about your family is that you don't choose it. If your life is dominated by an unchosen obligation, you are not, individually, very free.

Maybe you're living a life rich in some other benefits, that I, atomized westerner, don't understand. I'm not trying to render a judgment here. I'm just saying, the more powerful the family is, the less free the individual is.

Obviously, also true that state power radically encroaches on individual liberty, a point that libertarians are well acquainted with, as is anyone who has ever spoken to a libertarian at a cocktail party. I will not belabor it.

So liberalism has a twin project of maximizing freedom from state encroachment, and also, maximizing freedom from those unchosen family obligations, and the unargued, binding customs that support the family. In the early years, swell. But eventually, those two goals conflict.

Why? Because in fact, only able-bodied adults are capable of being autonomously choosing individuals.

We spend a lot of our lives unable to care for ourselves. Children, of course, can't. A woman with a child is not generally a viable economic unit without substantial support. Nor are the disabled. Or the sick. Or the elderly.

If you weaken the power of the family over individual lives, you also weaken its power to deliver social insurance to those groups.

Allow divorce and premarital sex, and you're going to have unpartnered mothers who can't support themselves without either substantial government subsidies, or a legal regime which compels paternal support. (Both, really).

If you aren't terrified of grandma's wrath, she can't make you take in Great Aunt Helen when she breaks her hip. The list goes on and on. Powerful families were both adjudicators of disputes, and providers of social insurance. When they weaken, the state *has* to step in.

(Okay, you can also just say "tough luck, let them die". I'm not going to say it. Neither is any society. So yeah, the state's going to step in.)

At some point, liberalism hit a fork; it got harder to pair social liberalism with political liberalism, because they conflict. Maximum individual *social* liberty means weak families, weak families means a strong state.

I pause to note that I'm not arguing that social liberalism means that we all end up living in some hedonistic childless perma-orgy. Obviously, families are still around. But they've been getting weaker for hundreds of years.

One fork leads to the Niskanen Center "Strong welfare state, economic liberalism, maximum social liberalism". Another fork leads to where I am "Modest welfare state, economic liberalism, high-but-not-maximum social liberalism". And there are still others.

But fundamentally, the realities of human reproduction and frailty mean that we cannot simply act as if human society can be constructed along the lines of a logic seminar. There are some things that have to be done; if families and culture aren't doing them, the state has to.

The state performs those functions very differently from families. In some ways better--families can be really oppressive, and there's a lot of variance. But also, in some ways less well.

My point was simply that we shouldn't take this longstanding trend in the development of liberal western societies to its illogical conclusion. We *do* reproduce viviparously; family *does* do some things better. We should be leery about messing with it.

Thrusting the state too deep into the organic machinery of the family risks breeding distrust of the state, and also, mucking up a really fundamental mechanism for producing healthy human beings. Institutions, no matter how well designed, are really bad substitutes for parents

(I mean this literally--institutionalized kids don't thrive even when the institution is run by nice, well meaning people with plenty of resources.)

I'm not arguing the state should never intervene in parenting decisions. But we should err on the side of the parents, and be suspicious of expansions of state power into a mechanism we don't actually understand all that well, and which is *really* fundamental.

Basically, I'm saying "This fork presents a tough choice. We need to muddle through, and understand that we *are* muddling, which means "first do no harm", or in other words, err on the side of *not breaking it*."

Don't overestimate how much experts actually know (or underestimate their willingness to offer opinions even when they don't know. Experts have prejudices too.) But really, really don't underestimate the power and value of the parent-child bond.

This is basically my approach to libertarianism too: incrementalist, with a healthy respect for limits, and a fear of revolutionary revisions of existing social welfare arrangements, even if I think they're probably suboptimal.

And with that, gotta hop. Just a reminder that *absolutely none of this* was found, other than a glancing way, in my column, and there are a *whole bunch of other arguments* you haven't read. So read the column. washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-a…

Oh, and then read my follow-up, which also contains *All new material* you have not read in this tweetstorm, on why we want so badly to believe in the perfection of expertise--and why we shouldn't. washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-par…

This is not the only relevant fact about liberalism, but it is the relevant fact for this column, which is why I modified it with "individualism"